In the 1990s China was among the countries with the highest suicide rates in the world (above 20 per 100,000), but by the global economic crisis they kept dropping as significantly (as they were by the end of 1990s) with the main force having been migration from rural to urban areas.
[non sequitur] Family conflicts are the number one cause of suicide in China; other common causes include poverty, and disease of the body and mind.
The significant decline is largely attributed to population migration from rural areas and the urbanization of the middle class.
Paul Yip, a co-author of the recent study and professor at the University of Hong Kong, said "no country has ever achieved such a rapid decline in suicides".
[18] For male members in the Han, physical mutilation and suicide were among the highest crimes, threats not only to the self but to the lineage.
[19] Ritual suicide was long practiced in traditional Chinese culture, owing both to the power of the state to enforce collective punishment against the families of disgraced ministers and to Confucian values that held that certain failures of virtue were worse than death, making suicide morally permissible or even praiseworthy in some altruistic contexts.
[22] Due to the above-mentioned aversion to physical mutilation (originating from the belief that the body was a gift from one's parents and desecrating it therefore an unfilial act[23]), the preferred methods—as recorded in for instance the Book of Han—appear to have been those that did not leave the corpse significantly disfigured, notably hanging/strangulation.
Notable suicides include Wu Zixu, whose compelled suicide was regretted by King Fuchai of Wu when he was proved right about the danger of Yue, and Qu Yuan, whose despair over his exile by King Qingxiang of Chu and sorrow over the capture of his capital by Qin in 278 BC is commemorated by China's annual Dragon Boat Festival.
Scholars have stated that these women were made to choose between losing their chastity and potentially shaming their families or taking their own lives.
Eventually, due to this type of ideological thinking, some women felt that their only option to obtain glory was to kill themselves, thus becoming a martyr.
The Qing government passed a law attempting to help preserve female chastity by allowing widows to inherit their husbands' wealth and property, which led to families' desire to remarry their widowed daughter-in-laws, so that the fortune would be returned to the clan.
In 1992, a physician was acquitted of the murder of a terminally ill cancer patient who was given a lethal injection.
[25] The Qing dynasty also made suicide illegal, so that any person that completed the act would not be able to receive any awards or special honors.